Love, Romance, and Other Shortcomings

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Note: This was originally published on wacie.com on June 4, 2013.

I won’t even deny it. I read romance novels.

It started with a benign curiosity. I’d see them in supermarkets, libraries, yard sales, grandparents’ houses. I knew all about these books; I’d heard about the overtly manly men, the diminutive but well-endowed women, the over-the-top sexual descriptions and unintentionally hilarious euphemisms. Despite that, I couldn’t help but feel drawn to them. I was attracted to the titles written in soft, sprawling script, the long windblown locks of the heroine, the unbuttoned shirts of the hero (and sometimes also his long windblown locks as well). To me, these books were beautiful, and when I finally had the chance, when I was a teenager in high school, I got one from the library. I got another. I came home with armfuls of them. I bought them online and filled my shelves with them. I hid them from my parents, but not so carefully. When I was found out, my mother only said that she wished I’d start reading “intellectual books” again.

I was enthralled by the first one I ever read. It was full of excitement, adventure, passion, and I shed a few tears at the end. The next one I read wasn’t as satisfying, but I still enjoyed it. Then, the more I read, the more I found wrong with them. I got frustrated by the male characters and their overbearing maleness, the females and their helplessness against it, and the general idea that love somehow solves everything in a matter of days, including abandonment issues, daddy issues, conflicting personalities, stalker tendencies, the list goes on. I got so annoyed by it that I stopped reading them.

I started reading them again a couple of years ago. Even though these books irritated me, I still kept them, even though there were certainly times I’d considered donating them to Goodwill or selling them all on eBay. When I began to take writing a bit more seriously, I gave them another go. After all, the women writing these books were actually getting published and selling, so they must be doing something right, right? Certainly there’s something to be learned here, even if the plots are flimsy, the characters are weak and stereotypical, and the sex scenes are the only decent parts of the book. I decided to mix a few in with my classic literature, poignant memoirs, and teen fiction.

I have learned many things from reading romance novels. The most important thing, probably, is that I’ve learned how not to write, or better yet, I’ve learned more about the kinds of stories I want to write. For instance, I really dislike it when authors spell out the rest of the characters’ lives. I know some people like that kind of closure, but I kind of like deciding for myself what happens to them. When I’m reading an ending about how two people who detested each other upon meeting fall in love after having fantastic earth-shattering sex, I don’t really want to know that right after they got married and bought a house and got a dog, they got pregnant with twins, or how the twins grew up and one went to Harvard and the other only got into the crappy state college, but her parents love her anyway, and they lived happily ever the end. I don’t really care. Not only do I feel like I’ve been fed a ton of useless information, I feel like this ending leaves very little room for realistic events. I guess that in a romantic fantasyland, bad things never happen, unless it’s to help facilitate true love. In real life, bad things happen to good people. Things like illness and poverty constantly affect people who don’t deserve it. Real people cheat on their spouses, even when they love them. Real people have vices and addictions and weaknesses. Real people have real problems that can’t be solved by love alone. I think that’s what my problem is with these books, they’re for people who want to forget that reality is a cruel, unforgiving thing.

Despite that, I have something to confess: these books make me feel inadequate as a woman. If these are books written for women, why don’t I enjoy them? Why do I struggle to finish them? Why do I roll my eyes so much while I’m reading? Do I not want to find true love? Do I not want to be wanted by a man? Do I not want to be cherished, desired, placed upon a pedestal?

Actually, romance novels aren’t the only thing that make me feel inadequate. I’m 27, and all my friends are married, engaged to be married, or desperately searching for a husband. They’re pregnant, trying to become pregnant, or ogling every baby that goes by. I don’t want any of those things. I don’t want to be a wife or a mother; I don’t want much more than I already have. I want someone I can watch Cops with while we drink beer. I want someone with the same lust for knowledge and culture that I have. I want someone I can stay up all night with, just talking about nothing in particular. It seems perfectly reasonable to me.

Then why do I feel like I’ve failed at being a woman?

I am not an adult.

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Note: This was originally published on wacie.com on March 24, 2013.

I am not an adult.

I fear I may never be.

My boyfriend moved out in November to take a year-long contract job in Atlanta. Since then, I have lived alone. It has been an illuminating experience, one I enjoyed at first: having the bed to myself, playing air drums without having anyone walk in on me, washing fewer dishes. I suddenly had more freedom than I’d ever had before. As time went by, though, I started missing small things about having another person around. The bed is always cold. Cooking for one person is depressing. The cats don’t laugh at my jokes. One of the cats actually went crazy and spent three months avoiding me in the backyard.

Since November, I’ve walked everywhere I go. It’s a fifteen minute walk to Dollar General from my house. There’s a convenience store five minutes away, but I’m certain half of the stuff in there has been there since they opened it. There’s a pack of diapers in there that looks like it’s been on that shelf since I wore diapers. Right, so fifteen minute walk to Dollar General. Since my budget is extremely tight now, I try not to spend more than ten dollars, and if the handbasket gets full, I have to stop, because I’ve probably got more than I can carry home. Typically, I’ve got a bag of cat food, cheap toilet paper, and ramen noodles. If I’m able, I’ll splurge on Milk Duds and a bottle or two of nail polish as a reward for walking my ass to the store. As a result of all this walking and a diet that’s not much more than caffeine and noodles, I’ve lost forty pounds. My favorite yoga pants don’t fit anymore.

I’ve done my best to keep myself busy, but it’s been a dull existence so far. I wake up, have breakfast and tea, put on some music and lay around the living room until two o’clock or so, when I start chores or do schoolwork. If I have time, I read or work on my embroidery project. I have lunch at some point, dinner at some point, then I spend the rest of the night writing. I thought that if I stay busy for the next year, I’ll stay sane.

Over the past few months, I’ve begun to feel like things are slipping out of my control. The sink in the laundry room got clogged somehow; I found this out when it overflowed the last time I tried to do laundry. I can’t unclog it. I’ve never had to unclog a sink in my life. I don’t even know how the plunger works. Because of this, laundry is piling up around my room and I have no way to take care of it. The grass is starting to get tall and I can’t mow the lawn because the shed is locked and I don’t have the key. I have all of these stupid idiot problems that could easily be solved by someone other than me.

Last night, there was this loud droning sound coming from the backyard. When I went to check it out, I notice there are frogs in and around the pool. It was like a scene from The Bible, whatever scene it is where somebody lets their pool go to hell and God sends a plague of frogs to embarrass them and annoy their neighbors. That happened, right? So there I am, it’s midnight, it’s still warm out, the moon is full and casts a pale light onto the water, giving me just enough to be able to see them swimming around. I get the pool net down and start scooping them out, emptying the net over the side of the fence. After two or three nets full of frog and leaves, I realize that I’m dumping them out right under my bedroom window. I don’t know how many I pulled out, or how long I was out there, but I was out there for quite a while. Despite my efforts, though, the noise didn’t stop. It was still coming from the pool, but it was also right under my window. I’d had a headache all day, so I went to bed early, and laid still and alert for half an hour, listening to the croaking before I gave up and slept on the couch in another room, where instead I listened to the neighborhood cats yowl and hiss at each other.

How in the world do I think I’m going to make it through the rest of the year? I clearly lack the skills necessary to keep my life from falling apart, that’s why my boyfriend moved out and I pay for cat food with change. I feel like I’m riding in a car with four flat tires. I could drive on it for a while, but sooner or later, it’s going to give out, and I’m going to be completely screwed.

Note: This was originally posted on wacie.com on March 24, 2013.

 

Spring Ahead

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Note: This was originally posted on wacie.com on March 16, 2013.

The first day of spring is this week, and I spent all day today preparing for it. I put away my winter coat and boots, my pinstripe trousers and sweaters, my hats and scarves. I pulled out all my cork platform shoes, my flowing maxi dresses, my plaid bermuda shorts and tube tops. I took all the fine, dainty jewelry I wore this winter out of the jewelry box and replaced it with handmade hemp bracelets and souvenir jewelry from my last vacation. I started daydreaming how I’ll style my hair, if I’ll dye the ends blue like I did last year, how I’ll wear my makeup. Spring is a time of change for everything else in nature; trees return to their lush fullness, flowers blossom and thrive. I, too, want to shed the cold, dark winter and become something beautiful. For me, this is what spring is all about. It’s my favorite time of the year.

It was 80 degrees today. The weather this winter was odd; most of January had these high temperatures, and they disappeared into February and March. I spent those months wrapped in hoodies and yoga pants and crocheted blankets, the warmest and most comfortable clothes I own, shaking my fist at the ceiling from the warmth of my couch. “Why can’t you be like January?” I’d ask. “Why are you warm for two days and cold again for the rest of the week? Why can’t you make up your mind?” I was starting to give up on ever being able to walk around my house in shorts again. Then today, the weather was sunny, warm, perfect. It was the day I waited all year for.

With spring on its way and summer around the corner, I have so much to look forward to: tanning by the pool, reading on the porch, sleeping with the windows open, eating gazpacho and drinking iced tea. I have some goals, as well: I want to write something new in April. I want to have my book completely finished by the end of summer. I want to ignore the world for the sake of my art. I’d like to go to Atlanta at least once, but that depends on whether I can find someone to feed my cats.

I feel like I wasted winter; I started so many projects and completed none of them. March is half over, and I still have nothing to show to people and say “Hey, look at what I did in 2013!” That’s going to change soon. I’m going to focus more on writing and let everything else go for a while. Spring may as well be the beginning of my year, and I plan to start it off right.

Hello World!

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I’m Stacie Cregg, and I’m a writer. I hope that I’ll be able to make this blog something great, unlike my last attempt at blogging, which just turned into a nail polish blog. In an attempt to do something with my life before I turn 30, I want to use this blog to launch myself as a writer, and hopefully realize my dream to become a published author. I’ll also settle for Internet celebrity. That’s fine, too.

Summer 2012 was when I got serious about writing. I’ve always had something of a talent for embellishing stories and creating new ones out of midair, often weaving elaborate, dramatic tales for people in bars or strangers on the Internet. One day, I realized that I could be using this talent for something meaningful, something important. Camp NaNoWriMo was starting that August, and I went for it, writing eighty thousand words just that month. I spent four or five months after that finishing it, another four or five months editing and redrafting it, and I’m currently editing the second draft. In addition to fiction, I plan to write often about the things I care about. I hope the reader will find a good mix of things here, from essays to opinions to short fiction. I hope that this will be a good experience for all of us, but especially for me, since I have the most to gain. Thanks for reading.